Frank Dikötter – författare

A FINANCIAL TIMES HIGHLIGHT FOR 2026 'The most important reappraisal of modern China to appear in years' PETER FRANKOPAN, author of The Silk Roads and The Earth TransformedFrom renowned, prize-winning historian Frank Dikötter – ‘the historian of China’ (Spectator) – a commanding new history of China’s path to Communism, brought to the people at the barrel of a gun.The history of modern China has long been portrayed as a tale of Communists fighting in the hills for freedom, gradually gaining popular support by taking land from the rich and giving it to the poor. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, Red Dawn Over China reveals how unlikely the Party's victory actually was, had it not been for financial and military support from the Soviet Union.Established in 1921 under the direct guidance of Moscow, for the best part of a decade the Communist Party left a trail of destruction, besieging towns and plundering the countryside. When the Communists managed to hold territory, they reduced the villagers to a state of servitude, undermining belief in their cause as well as the local economy. By 1936 they had the same popular appeal as an obscure religious sect. A brutal war of occupation by Japan allowed them to survive far behind enemy lines. After Soviet troops invaded Manchuria in 1945 and provided more money and munitions, the Communists at long last prevailed through a pitiless war of attrition, driven by an unflinching will to conquer at all costs.In this riveting tale told with great narrative verve, Frank Dikötter reveals how thirteen delegates gathered in a dusty room in 1921 ended up raising the red flag over the Forbidden City in 1949, forever altering the course of history for a quarter of humanity and shaping the world as we know it today.Praise for Frank Dikötter and the People's Trilogy:'Harrowing and brilliant' Ben Macintyre'Gripping and masterful' Simon Sebag Montefiore'One of the few books that anyone who wants to understand the twentieth century simply must read' New Statesman

A FINANCIAL TIMES HIGHLIGHT FOR 2026 'The most important reappraisal of modern China to appear in years' PETER FRANKOPAN, author of The Silk Roads and The Earth TransformedFrom renowned, prize-winning historian Frank Dikötter – ‘the historian of China’ (Spectator) – a commanding new history of China’s path to Communism, brought to the people at the barrel of a gun.The history of modern China has long been portrayed as a tale of Communists fighting in the hills for freedom, gradually gaining popular support by taking land from the rich and giving it to the poor. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, Red Dawn Over China reveals how unlikely the Party's victory actually was, had it not been for financial and military support from the Soviet Union.Established in 1921 under the direct guidance of Moscow, for the best part of a decade the Communist Party left a trail of destruction, besieging towns and plundering the countryside. When the Communists managed to hold territory, they reduced the villagers to a state of servitude, undermining belief in their cause as well as the local economy. By 1936 they had the same popular appeal as an obscure religious sect. A brutal war of occupation by Japan allowed them to survive far behind enemy lines. After Soviet troops invaded Manchuria in 1945 and provided more money and munitions, the Communists at long last prevailed through a pitiless war of attrition, driven by an unflinching will to conquer at all costs.In this riveting tale told with great narrative verve, Frank Dikötter reveals how thirteen delegates gathered in a dusty room in 1921 ended up raising the red flag over the Forbidden City in 1949, forever altering the course of history for a quarter of humanity and shaping the world as we know it today.Praise for Frank Dikötter and the People's Trilogy:'Harrowing and brilliant' Ben Macintyre'Gripping and masterful' Simon Sebag Montefiore'One of the few books that anyone who wants to understand the twentieth century simply must read' New Statesman

'A revolutionary book' Sunday Times'A pulsating account' Peter Frankopan*A SPECTATOR AND NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR*How did the People’s Republic of China transform from a backwater economy in the 1970s into the world superpower of today? Drawing on hundreds of previously unseen archival documents, award-winning historian Frank Dikötter recasts our understanding of an era that both the regime and foreign admirers alike celebrate as an economic miracle. In a fascinating tale spanning five decades, he examines the country’s economic transformation alongside the regime’s determined suppression of dissent, its increasing hostility towards the West and its development into a thoroughly entrenched dictatorship led by Xi Jinping – one equipped with a sprawling security apparatus and the most sophisticated surveillance system in the world.‘Essential reading for anyone who wants to know what has shaped today’s China and what the Chinese Communist Party’s choices mean for the rest of the world’ New Statesman‘A blow-by-blow account of the uneven, reactive and sometimes chaotic course of economic policies . . . An important corrective’ Financial Times‘Dikötter has been mining Chinese primary sources for decades . . . A clear-eyed and detailed account’ Observer

Acclaimed by the Daily Mail as 'definitive and harrowing', this is the final volume of ‘The People’s Trilogy', begun by the Samuel Johnson prize-winning Mao's Great Famine.'The seminal English language work on the subject’ Sunday Times‘A major contribution to scholarship on modern China, one that is unequalled, certainly in the English language … both revealing and rewarding reading – for specialists and non-specialists alike' Literary ReviewAfter the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives between 1958 and 1962, an ageing Mao launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The stated goal of the Cultural Revolution was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalist elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. But the Chairman also used the Cultural Revolution to turn on his colleagues, some of them longstanding comrades-in-arms, subjecting them to public humiliation, imprisonment and torture.Young students formed Red Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with semi-automatic weapons in the name of revolutionary purity. As the country descended into chaos, the military intervened, turning China into a garrison state marked by bloody purges that crushed as many as one in fifty people.When the army itself fell victim to the Cultural Revolution, ordinary people used the political chaos to resurrect the market and hollow out the party's ideology. In short, they buried Maoism. In-depth interviews and archival research at last give voice to the people and the complex choices they faced, undermining the picture of conformity that is often understood to have characterised the last years of Mao's regime. By demonstrating that decollectivisation from below was an unintended consequence of a decade of violent purges and entrenched fear, Frank Dikötter casts China's most tumultuous era in a wholly new light.Written with unprecedented access to previously classified party documents from secret police reports to unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches, this third chapter in Frank Dikötter's extraordinarily lucid and ground-breaking 'People's Trilogy' is a devastating reassessment of the history of the People's Republic of China.

In 1995 the People's Republic of China passed a controversial Eugenics Law, which, after a torrent of international criticism, was euphemistically renamed the Maternal and Infant Health Law. Aimed at "the implementation of premarital medical checkups" to ensure that neither partner has any hereditary, venereal, reproductive, or mental disorders, the ordinance implies that those deemed "unsuitable for reproduction" should undergo sterilization or abortion or remain celibate in order to prevent "inferior births." Using this recent statute as a springboard, Frank Dikotter explores the contexts and history of eugenics in both Communist China and Taiwan. Dikotter shows how beginning in Late Imperial China, Western eugenics was imported and combined with existing fears of cultural, racial, or biological degeneration in Chinese society, leading to government regulation of sexual reproduction. Imperfect Conceptions is a revealing look at the cultural history of medical explanations of birth defects that demonstrates how Chinese assumptions about the relationship of the individual to society form the very core of their attitudes toward procreation.Dikotter explains the patrilineal model of descent, where a person is viewed as the culmination of his or her ancestors and is held responsible for the health of all future generations. By this logic, a pregnant woman's behavior and attitude directly influence the well-being of her baby, and a deformed or retarded child reflects a moral failing on the part of the parents. Dikotter also shows how the holistic medicine practiced in China blurs any distinction between individual and environment so that people are held responsible for illness. Drawing on cultural, social, economic, and political approaches, Dikotter goes beyond a simple authoritarian model to provide a more complex view of eugenic policy, showing how a variety of voices including those of popular journalists, social reformers, medical writers, sex educators, university professors, and politicians all disseminate information that supports rather than questions the state's program.Imperfect Conceptions reveals how Chinese cultural currents-fear and fascination with the deviant and the urge to draw clear boundaries between the normal and the abnormal-have combined with medical discourse to form a program of eugenics that is viewed with alarm by the rest of the world.

Based on extensive research and many newly discovered sources, Crime, Punishment, and the Prison in Modern China examines the radical changes in Chinese society during the first half of the twentieth century through the lens of the Chinese prison system. More than a simple history of prison rules or penal administration, this book explores the profound effects and lasting repercussions of the superimposition of Western-derived models of repentance and rehabilitation on traditional Chinese categories of crime and punishment. A society's prisons reflect much about its notions not only of law and order and the rights of the individual, but of human nature itself, its tractability and capacity to change. In China during the tumultuous years from 1895 to 1949, these notions were transformed in dramatic ways. Frank Dikotter identifies penal reform as a radical modern tool to achieve an indigenous Chinese vision of social cohesion and the rule of virtue. Modernizing elites in China viewed the reformation of criminals as a constitutive part of a project of a national regeneration in which good order, economic development, and state power could only be obtained by shaping obedient subjects.This groundbreaking account of the evolution of Chinese penal theory is brought together with a richly textured portrait of daily life behind bars. Petty villains, abusive guards, ambitious wardens, and idealist reformers people its pages and vividly trace China's complicated movement from empire to republic to communist state.

Prisons are on the increase from the United States to China, as ever-larger proportions of humanity find themselves behind bars. While prisons now span the world, we know little about their history in global perspective. Rather than interpreting the prison's proliferation as the predictable result of globalization, Cultures of Confinement underlines the fact that the prison was never simply imposed by colonial powers or copied by elites eager to emulate the West, but was reinvented and transformed by a host of local factors, its success being dependent on its very flexibility. Complex cultural negotiations took place in encounters between different parts of the world, and rather than assigning a passive role to Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the authors of this book point out the acts of resistance or appropriation that altered the social practices associated with confinement. The prison, in short, was understood in culturally specific ways and reinvented in a variety of local contexts examined here for the first time in global perspective.

The second installment in 'The People's Trilogy', the groundbreaking series from Samuel Johnson Prize-winning author Frank Dikötter‘For anyone who wants to understand the current Beijing regime, this is essential background reading’ Anne Applebaum‘Essential reading for all who want to understand the darkness that lies at the heart of one of the world's most important revolutions’ Guardian‘Dikötter performs here a tremendous service by making legible the hugely controversial origins of the present Chinese political order’ Timothy SnyderIn 1949 Mao Zedong hoisted the red flag over Beijing’s Forbidden City. Instead of liberating the country, the communists destroyed the old order and replaced it with a repressive system that would dominate every aspect of Chinese life.In an epic of revolution and violence which draws on newly opened party archives, interviews and memoirs, Frank Dikötter interweaves the stories of millions of ordinary people with the brutal politics of Mao’s court. A gripping account of how people from all walks of life were caught up in a tragedy that sent at least five million civilians to their deaths.

WINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE ‘A gripping and masterful portrait of the brutal court of Mao, based on new research but also written with great narrative verve' Simon Sebag Montefiore'Harrowing and brilliant' Ben Macintyre‘A critical contribution to Chinese history' Wall Street JournalBetween 1958 and 1962, 45 million Chinese people were worked, starved or beaten to death. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up with and overtake the West in less than fifteen years. It led to one of the greatest catastrophes the world has ever known. Dikotter's extraordinary research within Chinese archives brings together for the first time what happened in the corridors of power with the everyday experiences of ordinary people, giving voice to the dead and disenfranchised. This groundbreaking account definitively recasts the history of the People's Republic of China.

‘Brilliant’ NEW STATESMAN, BOOKS OF THE YEAR‘Enlightening and a good read’ SPECTATOR‘Moving and perceptive’ NEW STATESMANMussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, Ceausescu, Mengistu of Ethiopia and Duvalier of Haiti.No dictator can rule through fear and violence alone. Naked power can be grabbed and held temporarily, but it never suffices in the long term. A tyrant who can compel his own people to acclaim him will last longer. The paradox of the modern dictator is that he must create the illusion of popular support. Throughout the twentieth century, hundreds of millions of people were condemned to enthusiasm, obliged to hail their leaders even as they were herded down the road to serfdom. In How to Be a Dictator, Frank Dikötter returns to eight of the most chillingly effective personality cults of the twentieth century. From carefully choreographed parades to the deliberate cultivation of a shroud of mystery through iron censorship, these dictators ceaselessly worked on their own image and encouraged the population at large to glorify them. At a time when democracy is in retreat, are we seeing a revival of the same techniques among some of today’s world leaders?This timely study, told with great narrative verve, examines how a cult takes hold, grows, and sustains itself. It places the cult of personality where it belongs, at the very heart of tyranny.